The seventeenth holes on golf courses seem to be designed with one goal in mind: to ruin your day.

In golf there are rules, which most of us abide by (if we know what they are), and then there are the laws, which may not be written but are much more powerful. For example, it is a rule of golf that you can spend five minutes looking for a ball that may be lost, but it is a law of golf that if you don’t find it in one minute, you will never find it.

The same goes for golf course design. It is a rule among the designers that the closing holes do not move from east to west, to avoid afternoon finishers always playing towards the setting sun. But it’s an unwritten law that a course should have a relatively benign start and an absolutely stinking 17th hole, or at least, that’s what it often seems. The final holes can be tough, and there are some around the world who back that claim, but the penultimate hole on a course, the dreaded 17th, must be even tougher. We don’t know why this should be so, it’s just the law.

Johnny Miller once said that every golf course should have a butt-punching hole, and maybe that’s true, but it seems more than coincidental that this dreaded experience is always immediately after the 16th, if you think about some of the most famous courses in the world, the penultimate hole is the one that begins to worry players long before they reach the tee. Sawgrass and its famous island green, Road Hole at St Andrews, probably the most famous single hole in the world: Carnoustie, Valderrama, Kiawah Island, Wentworth West, the list of infamous penultimate holes goes on.

And if you think about it, that’s good psychology on the part of the course designer or architect. You’ve got a good score and you just need to hang on for a couple more holes, with nothing worse than a bogey, bogey end, and the tournament, the money, or the best score ever is in the bag. And then you stand on the 17th hole and you’d give anything, even your firstborn, to avoid having to hit that tee shot. If someone offered you bogey, you would go straight to the final hole.

But they won’t, and you have to play, and now you find out how good you really are. Teeing off a relatively open fairway early in the round is easy. It’s even comparatively easy on a difficult and dangerous hole on the front nine, because if you make a mistake, you still have time to recover. But now you’re on the Old Course at St Andrews and you have to climb over the old railway sheds that jut out from the side of the hotel. To have any chance of getting to the green, you need to favor the right side of the fairway, which you can’t see, by the way, but overdo the fade a bit and you’re out of play. Jump left and not only have you missed the fairway, but there’s no way you’re going to get to the green without facing the most feared bunker in world golf. Oh, and hit it on the wide but not deep green and you’re probably up against a wall, no shot.

Other than that, it’s child’s play. Ben Crenshaw once said that the reason the Road Hole is one of the best par fours in the world is because it is a par six, and to most mortals it should be.

And how about the 17th in Sawgrass, home every year of the Players Championship on the US Tour? Many golfers take one look and think, ‘This must have been conceived by a madman,’ and they’re almost right: it was built by Pete Dye. And yet, the hole actually happened by accident. Dye originally intended it to have water on the right hand side, but during construction he found a rare bag of sand, needed elsewhere to develop fairways, and when they finished digging the sand, all that was left on 17 was a big hole. .

Years later, Pete Dye confessed: ‘We had a big hole in the ground with no green at all. Alicia [Dye’s wife] He said, “Why not just make a green island?” and I said, “I don’t know.”‘

So there you have it. The most damaging and possibly most hated hole in the US Tour occurred because the architect was too dumb to think of anything else, or he was too scared to argue with his wife. That would be bad enough, but the 17th at Sawgrass has seen so much drama and swallowed so many golf balls, along with the dreams of the players who hit them moments before, that it’s been copied around the world.

A good 17 gets under your skin. You care, as it should, both in anticipation and execution. It’s like a test that offers a few manageable and relatively simple questions before asking you to explain, in words of three syllables or less, Einstein’s theory of relativity. Or the girlfriend who, just as you’re unhooking her bra, asks, ‘Do you love me?’ It’s the unanswered question, the ultimate challenge, and if you screw up there’s no time to make amends or undo the damage you’ve done.

If you think I’m exaggerating, ask Darren Clarke. At the recent season finale Volvo Masters Andalucia, the big money jamboree event at Valderrama for Europe’s top 60 where there is no cut and even last place wins €15,500, Darren was at the top of his game, which at Darren’s case means that there are few players in the world who can match him. After a modest starting 73, he entered the second round with something to prove and played fabulous, exquisite golf on the most difficult layout in Europe until, by the time he reached 17, he was ahead of the pack at three under par. He then hit three balls into the water protecting the green and hit an 11 on the par five. It meant that he slipped from first to 27th on one hole. He still scored a respectable 72 but his tournament was over, he knew it, and so did we. And all through a hole.

Or what about the penultimate hole at Carnoustie? This course has a famously hard finish, just ask Jean Van De Velde, but of the devilish trio of hole-closings, 17th is the most satanic. The Barry Burn meanders its seemingly haphazard route in such a way as to create, in effect, an island on which the tee shot must land. Granted, if the wind is in your favor and you’re a big hitter, you can try to carry both parts of the current and have a relatively direct approach, but at Carnoustie, on this hole, as if the golf gods decreed, the the wind is never in your favor. So you lie down in the short-grass shelter, and whatever you do, don’t shoot it because that also means your ball will be wet, and then you have a long iron to a well-protected green, which you can’t see. because it sits in a little valley, which is angled away from you. When Paul Lawrie won the Open here in 1999, he was so convinced this was the keyhole that he commissioned artist David Maxwell to paint the hole as the focal point of the artist’s tribute to his victory.

You need more? How about Royal Troon, where in July of this year Todd Hamilton finally bested Ernie Els in a four-hole playoff? Well, that’s what the records say, but really it all worked out on one hole, the 17th. A long par three with a raised green that’s deep but not wide and with bunkers on either side. There is only one option, hit a long straight iron. A piece of cake really, except Hamilton did it, Ernie didn’t and the claret jug went west. Again.

You may wish it weren’t, but the laws of golf and the fraternity of golf course architects have decreed that the 17th hole should be the meanest, toughest, scariest hole of all, so you’d better get used to it. to the idea .